Video codec engines are whirring back into life, disturbed by recent HEVC Advance movements in Asia Pacific. Netflix sent out disruptive ripples of its own late last week by adding support for AV1 on Android smartphones in a move that will see adoption soar for the royalty-free, Google-backed compression technology. Netflix has reported 20% compression efficiency gains over VP9 by replacing it with AV1, which you could criticize for underperforming considering AV1 has promised as much as 30% efficiency increases over current generation codecs VP9 and HEVC (H.265). However, AV1 decoding is 30% more complex than VP9 or AVC. Only select Netflix titles are available to stream via the Data Saving feature that enables AV1 compression. Netflix is simply reacting…